Thank goodness for the storytellers — the ones who probe, question, irritate the powerful

In every community, village, town and region there are natural journalists: people who observe, record, analyze, remember, and challenge.

AT A GLANCE

• The year has highlighted the vulnerability of global supply chains and the impact of climate change, prompting a need for informed storytelling.
• Journalists play a crucial role in transforming information overload into informed citizenship, advocating for communities and holding power accountable.
• There is a growing need for recognition and protection of journalists, as well as a call for diverse media outlets to ensure a well-informed public and meaningful civil participation.

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This is the year the world caught fire. Often literally — wildfires across Europe and America stopped even the most vocal of climate change skeptics. But also figuratively. We are reminded again how global supply chains are vulnerable to geopolitical shocks, how endless wars force whole communities into spaces they do not want to be and are not welcome.  

And online, a torrent of AI-generated and distributed content pretends to try to make sense of it all but actually confuses and imperils us.

Thank goodness then for the storytellers. The journalists, the ones who probe, question, irritate the powerful. The ones who sit and listen with the grieving and try to understand those who are furious.

Technology turns up the volume of public discourse, but rarely gives us the information we need at the moment we need it. Journalists do. They turn people deluged with information into informed citizens, able to advocate for themselves and to push for change.

And they are everywhere. In every community, village, town, and region, there are natural journalists: people who observe, record, analyze, remember, and challenge.

They are the eyes and ears of our local media outfits, often in places where there’s no market significant enough to support the “classical” news operations.

They are the ones holding a camera and trying to stop their hands shaking as they film a glacier breaking away and sweeping away whole streets in Nepal. They are the ones who spot diggers rolling into a remote Kazakh town and wonder if the ramshackle gold mine that suddenly appeared is legal.

The journalists are also the ones who listen, who allow the voiceless to have a voice and help people tell the story of their lives.

And there are also the journalists who keep at that work long after the rest of the world has looked away. They are also the ones who stay to ask what happens next. How will homes be rebuilt after a catastrophe? Why are the glaciers melting? Who is behind the mining operations that are destroying a local landscape and why are regional authorities allowing them to operate without permits?

These storytellers and journalists need recognition and they need protection to keep doing their job. They need legal covers from the powerful who try to stop them from asking the difficult questions and uncovering the answers. They need a backup when fighting technology companies that profit from their work without paying for it.

Most importantly they need audiences, readers, and communities that recognize and value the importance of what they do.

Our information ecosystems — the digital, audio visual and written messages we receive in our everyday lives — still need journalists to function properly. And crucially they need a plurality of journalists — the small, independent outlets to harness the energy of the streets, and the large, well-established newsrooms willing to take on the big fights.

This is a challenge for generations. Across the world young people are picking up cameras and phones to record their own stories and walk into public life with demands, questions, and ideas.

This is a huge opportunity for the new mobile-first outlets that carry their stories across social media, but it is also the chance for larger, more established newsrooms to win the trust of the younger audiences they have been searching for.

It matters to all of us. There can be no meaningful civil participation without facts, context, and questions. Anyone who wants to sow confusion and misery takes away information, silences those who ask questions, and denies people the right to know about the world around them. There is an easy way to fight back. Read the news, tell your story, be informed. Be heard. – Rappler.com

Meera Selva is CEO at Internews Europe. This opinion piece was commissioned as part of the World News Day campaign, an initiative to show the value of journalism.